This article from Cracked might help - real-life royalty ranging from Harald the Lousy and Ivar the Boneless, to Alfonso the Slobberer and Henry the Impotent... oh yeah, and Constantine the Dung-Named, but that's a ridiculous-sounding nickname no matter HOW you look at it.

Caligula's real name was esentially a coglomeration of names of previous rulers of Rome. "Caligula" is Latin for "Little Boots", a name he got from soldiers because he was given a little uniform with little armour when his father took him into war.

Maurice Druon's The Accursed Kings series charts the collapse of fourteenth century France under a series of weak and ineffectual monarchs. In quick succession, Louis X is also known as "the Halfwit" and a later king is "The Makeshift"

^ Because monarchs are more important than others — story-wise, and an unflattering nickname shows how utterly they failed their subjects. Rulers usually strive to be known by flattering epithets, like the Great or Lion Heart or Good King, no?

We have many nickname tropes, but this would be a very specific subtrope.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy